Mozilla working on open-source OS

A post on MozillaWiki details the Firefox dudes’ plans to make a standalone operating system for the open web, that’ll eventually run on phones and tablets. Their belief is that “the web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development.”

The project is called Boot To Gecko (Gecko being the engine behind Firefox and Thunderbird), or B2G for short.

“We will do this work in the open,” reads the MozillaWiki post. “We will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process.

“We aren't trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we're trying to have them run on the web.”

The post goes on to explain that the Boot To Gecko project is still very much in its infancy: “Some pieces of it are only captured in our heads today, others aren’t fully explored. We’re talking about it now because we want expertise from all over Mozilla -- and from people who aren’t yet part of Mozilla -- to inform and build the project we’re outlining here.”

There’s lots more in-depth discussion over on this accompanying thread. In it, Mozilla’s Andreas Gal explains that the “ultimate goal” is “breaking the stranglehold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world”.